Dream Voices
Duncan Barford
DREAM VOICES
~~~~~~~~~~~~
I have been paying very close attention not so much to my
dreams, but to the *thoughts* I wake with in the morning, or at
various times during the night.
I am interested in Freud's assertion that "dreaming is a kind of
thinking", and thought I might be able to explore this a little
if I could get down on paper more exactly what was going through
my head immediately on waking, rather than remembering and
composing a dream "narrative".
My equipment for this experiment was highly sophisticated: a pad
of scrap paper hung up by a nail on the wall next to my bed,
with a pencil attached by a length of string. (Eat your hearts
out, Dement and Kleitman!) It was not easy, but I managed to
snatch a few tiny snippets from the booming, buzzing confusion
of my brain on waking.
In every instance, although I could remember having written
something down during the night, what was actually written on
the pad proved a complete surprise in the morning. It was as if
these thoughts would have evaporated completely from my memory
had I not captured them on paper.
Are these weird snippets "dreams"? I certainly did not
experience them as such - they seemed purely ideas or thoughts I
woke with; I did not see them as representing any kind of
imagined "experience" (as is usually the case with dreams). But
if they are to be thought of as "thoughts", what kind of
thoughts are they, for they bear only an indistinct relationship
to the waking variety?
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FIRST NIGHT:
The time has come to live out the machine in the London-world.
No! The time has come to live out the London-world in the
machine.
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SECOND NIGHT:
Some people have posted back maps from their journey.
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THIRD NIGHT:
And we need a raging pear.
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FOURTH NIGHT:
When a contract is fulfilled, it shifts the whole thing against
itself, by mistake.
For Frank, it was partially fondant.
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FIFTH NIGHT:
You've got to come round and have a try at our work, CBS.
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SIXTH NIGHT (a woman's "voice"):
I have this wonderful feeling about life: that it is only one
form of something...
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SEVENTH NIGHT (I was thinking over and over again a passage of
prose I was constructing, as part of a "novel"):
"But I love the French!" exclaimed Carew. "Their music makes
such excellent background - and foreground - to my
adventures..."
But he had already gone down with the rest of the soldiers.
Each disappearing into perdition, over the edge of the
horizon...
================================================================
These weird snippets sound to me like nonsense verse, and like
the kinds of things I have heard said by people with mental
illness. These are not so much thoughts as "pronouncements". In
thought, one is in the process of heading somewhere, one is
feeling one's way forward... These snippets, on the other hand,
give the impression of a kind of verbal dressing-up of a theme
worked out well in advance. For example, No. 1: that "No!" is
rhetorical; there is no sense of a reasoned reversal of the
opening assertion...
There is also a curious sense of self-reflexiveness about these
"statements": No. 2, for instance, is a fairly reasonable
description of the project I had set myself - as if the
experiment were featuring as a datum in the experiment!
If anyone has any ideas or comments concerning what these
strange items are or mean (apart from the obvious - the deranged
ravings of an idle mind!) then please share them...
Duncan.
Hugh Watkins
I trust my morning intuition
If I have formulated a problem the previous day
I often wake up with a good solution
if one lives alone and can extend this waking meditation/prayer for up to one
hour without distraction once or twice a week
so can one tap creativity in writing and painting (for example)
Hugh W
dbo...@eden.com
Duncan Barford <dun...@fastnet.co.uk> wrote:
>DREAM VOICES
>~~~~~~~~~~~~
>================================================================
>FIRST NIGHT:
>Duncan.
Duncan, I think they are all language...the native language of "soul"
we call the subconscious. It utilizes imagery we call metaphor
because its operating system is composed of feeling or emotion. Who
can get emotional about conjunctions or prepositions? The
subconscious gets to the "meat" of our energy reality and that meat is
emotional energy. So it speaks in the tongue of feeling.
Some of the symbols above might be only known or decipherable by you
and some might be universal amongst most of us.
For instance the sixth seems a fairly literal statement about reality
and since it is a woman's voice it is indicated as coming from the
subconscious. The seventh, about the "French", could represent
physicality or sensuousness as they sometimes do. The earth is a sort
of a war zone where we disappear over many hills in our development
through it in time. The fourth night seems to be a reference to
"cause and effect" in the material world. The "machine" indicated in
the first could be a reference to life as the machine...or cause and
effect as in the above. Backmaps of a journey, in night two, seem
like references to "memory" to me.
Don
Note: For anyone interested, you can see a more detailed
explanation of my dream theory on my www page (still
under construction) at: http://www.txmusic.com/dream.htm
Click on dream FAQs